Children’s Minister Dawn Primarolo today announced a £31 million goverment investment scheme for some of the country’s most deprived areas:
Eight projects in some of the most deprived areas of the country have been awarded funding through Round 2 of the flagship myplace programme. This continues the Government’s commitment to provide young people with exciting things to do and safe places to go when they’re most needed. The successful projects will be led by:

London Borough of Enfield
Voluntary Action, Luton
Square Chapel Trust, Halifax
Dorset County Council, Weymouth
Coast and Moors Voluntary Action, Scarborough
Poplar …

In contrast to a news report earlier this week, the Daily Express reports today that youth unemployment has reached a record high:
YOUTH unemployment reached a record high today as the jobless total nudged 2.5 million, the worst total since the mid-1990s.
The number of unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds was 952,000 in the three months to October, a quarterly rise of 6,000 and the highest figure since records began in 1992.
Total unemployment increased by 21,000 to 2.49 million, the highest level since early 1995, although the quarterly rise was the smallest for …

A review to be published today, The Guardian reports, will call for more help and support for parents with special eduation needs children, the review will call for:

A new national helpline for parents to obtain information and advice.
Ofsted will focus more on SEN provision in its inspections.
Parents should be able to have clear expectations of what they can expect, and this must be uniform across the country to end the postcode lottery in provision.
New funding for the Local Government Ombudsman to take on parental complaints on SEN.
More pressure …

A 26 month study of youth facilities has uncovered that the primary reason they remain underused is from fear of gangs:
The investigation, published in Journal of Youth Studies, found that young people are often labelled as gang members because of where they live or where they go, including “certain youth and community buildings”.
Authors Robert Ralphs, Juanjo Medina and Judith Aldridge from the University of Manchester said “police employed similar strategies to those of rival gangs when evaluating whether someone was a gang member, most often based on being seen in …

The Times reports today that due to the difficulty in vetting foriegners they will be exempt from goverment checks before working with children:

Thousands of foreigners who work with children will escape the full checks designed to stop abusers, the Government’s safeguarding watchdog has warned.
Sir Roger Singleton, the Government’s child protection adviser, said that there were “significant barriers” preventing officials from obtaining details of criminal offences committed abroad, by both foreigners and Britons.
via The Times

Although youth employment is high of late, a recent TUC report highlights that even though this is the case, employment rates still aren’t as high as mid-1980s:
26 per cent of young people were classified as either unemployed or “economically inactive” in 1984, three years after the end of the downturn earlier in the decade.
This total was compared by the organisation to youth unemployment figures from July to September 2009 of 21 per cent.
Via Women in Technology

In a new apprenticeship scheme the government is to offer incentives of $2,500 to companies who take on young apprentices, The Guardian reports:
In plans to be set out alongside a Department for Work and Pensions white paper on job creation on Tuesday, Iain Wright, the apprenticeships minister, will announce the new incentives to get work-based training for teenagers who do not want to go to university.
Under the existing apprenticeship scheme, young people’s training is funded by the government, but they receive a minimum wage of £95 a week from their …

In a recent report The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) expressed concern relating to the strip searching of youths in corrective insitituions:
The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), which visited Huntercombe YOI at the end of last year, said it considered "the routine practice of strip-searching of juveniles is a disproportionate measure which could be considered as degrading."
But the UK government said it did not consider strip-searching to be a disproportionate …